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lukeprog comments on Do Humans Want Things? - Less Wrong
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Suppose you have a neurological disorder that will be cured by a 140-volt electrical shock. If your brain can't encode value for propositions or simulated states of affairs or anything like that, but only for stimuli, then this reference point business I described means that your brain doesn't have the option of encoding value for a 140-volt electrical shock, because it never receives that kind of information in the first place. The transducer discards information about the objective intensity of the stimuli before the signal reaches the brain.
As Kaj says, this is a smart solution to lots of problems, but it does mean that the brain cannot encode value for the objective intensity of stimuli... at least given what I've explained in this post so far. (Model-based representations of value will be described later.)
Does that make sense?
If the neurological problem is located in the brain, then the brain does record information about the objective intensity of the stimuli, by being cured or not cured.
I'm confused about what the purpose of this example is. There are easier ways to show why not encoding values for propositions is problematic.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that this doesn't happen in a way that allows your neurons to encode value for a 140-volt electrical shock. Perhaps you've already accepted this and find it obvious, but others (e.g. economists) do not. This kind of information about how the brain works constrains our models of human behavior, just like the stochasticity of neuron firing does.
But I'm not trying to show why encoding values for propositions is problematic. I'm trying to say that the brain does not encode values for objective intensities of stimuli.
Given that one could use propositions about objective intensities of stimuli (as you do now, to point out that what's encoded in this particular simple way is not it), the thesis is still unclear.
Sure, but that depends on a different mechanism we don't know much about, then. What I'm saying is that "Whaddyaknow, we discovered a mechanism that actually encodes value for stimuli with neuron firing rates! Ah, but it can't encode value for the objective intensities of stimuli, because the brain doesn't have that information. So that constrains our theories about the motivation of human behavior."
The brain has (some measure of reference/access to) that information, just not in that particular form. And if it has (reference to) that information, it's not possible to conclude that motivation doesn't refer to it. It just doesn't refer to it through exclusively the form of representation that doesn't have the information, but then it would be very surprising if motivation compartmentalized so.
Right. I guess I'm struggling for a concise way to say what I'm trying to say, and hoping you'll interpret me correctly based on the long paragraphs I've written explaining what I mean by these shorter sentences. Maybe something like:
"Whaddyaknow, we discovered a mechanism that actually encodes value for stimuli with neuron firing rates! Ah, but this particular mechanism can't encode value for the objective intensities of stimuli, because this mechanism discards that information at the transducer. So that constrains our theories about the motivation of human behavior."
Also, this doesn't sound right. Why is that behavioral pattern "value"? Maybe it should be edited out of the system, like pain, or reversed, or modified in some complicated way.
Doesn't really help. The problem is that (normative) motivation is the whole thing, particular (unusual) decisions can be formed by any component, so it's unclear how to rule out stuff on the basis of properties of particular better-understood components.
Behavior is easier to analyze, you can see which factors contribute how much, and in this sense you can say that particular classes of behavior are determined mostly by this here mechanism that doesn't have certain data, and so behavior is independent from that data. But such conclusions won't generalize to normative motivation, because prevailing patterns of behavior might be suboptimal, and it's possible to improve them (by exercising the less-prevalent modes of behavior that are less understood), making them depend on things that they presently don't depend on.
What do you mean by 'normative motivation'?
Considerations that should motivate you. What do you mean by "motivation"?
(Strictly speaking, it's not necessary to know something in order to be motivated by it. If a fact is considered relevant, but isn't known, that creates instrumental motivation for finding out what it is! And even if you can't learn something, you might want to establish a certain dependence of the outcome on that fact, no matter what the fact is.)
Ah, understood.
Okay. I understand that it's a fact that the brain doesn't encode values for objective intensities of sensory stimuli. My puzzlement comes from when you say
I don't see the fact as an additional problem for a theory of human values. But there's no point in arguing about this, as I think we'd both agree that any theory of human values would have to accommodate the fact.
Hmmm. Maybe a clearer way to say it is just that this neurobiological finding further constrains our theories. I'll change the wording in the OP, thanks.